Virtual research environments provide an easy access to e-Infrastructures for researchers by creating an abstracted service-oriented layer on top of the available resources. Using the portal, researchers can focus on the research workflow and data analysis while being provided with a consolidated unified view of all tools necessary for their activities. The sustainable lifecycle of a virtual research environment can only be achieved if it is going to be used with high quality of experience by a large body of users. Aiming for this goal, in this paper we analyse the requirements and implementation of a cross-community virtual research environment that brings together researchers from three different domains. Promoting interdisciplinary research and cooperation, the federated virtual research environment is based on the service orientation paradigm, offering anything as a service solutions. Thus, the main pillar for a successful implementation of this solution is the careful design and management of the underlying elementary services and service compositions. The rest of the paper discusses the challenges of the service management implementation focusing on interoperability by design and service management standards.

PLQCD is a stand-alone software library developed under PRACE for lattice QCD. It provides an implementation of the Dirac operator for Wilson type fermions and few efficient linear solvers. The library is optimized for multi-core machines using a hybrid parallelization with OpenMP+MPI. The main objectives of the library is to provide a scalable implementation of the Dirac operator for efficient computation of the quark propagator. In this contribution, a description of the PLQCD library is given together with some benchmark results.

This book is a collection of carefully reviewed papers presented during the HP-SEE User Forum, the meeting of the High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for South East Europes (HP-SEE) Research Communities, held in October 17-19, 2012, in Belgrade, Serbia. HP-SEE aims at supporting and integrating regional HPC infrastructures; implementing solutions for HPC in the region; and making HPC resources available to research communities in SEE,region, which are working in a number of scientific fields with specific needs for massively parallel execution on powerful computing resources. HP-SEE brings together research communities and HPC operators from 14 different countries and enables them to share HPC facilities, software, tools, data and research results, thus fostering collaboration and strengthening the regional and national human network; theproject specifically supports research groups in the areas of computational physics, computational chemistry and the life sciences. The contributions presented in this book are organized in four main sections: computational physics; computational chemistry; the life sciences; and scientific computing and HPC operations.

Remote Instrumentation Services go far beyond in offering networked access to remote instrument resources. They are asserting themselves as a method of fully integrated instruments (including laboratory equipment, large-scale experimental facilities, and sensor networks) in a Service Oriented Architecture, where users can view and operate them in the same fashion as computing and storage resources. The deployment of test beds for a large basis of scientific instrumentation and e-Science applications is mandatory to develop new functionalities to be embedded in the existing middleware to enable such integration, to test it on the field, and to promote its usage in scientific communities. The DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) project is a major effort in this direction. Since the performance of the network infrastructure interconnecting the instrumental, computing and storage resources heavily affects the behaviour of DORII applications, a network monitoring platform has been designed and set-up. After the description of the network monitoring platform, the paper discusses the results concerning two selected applications with the aim of finding a correlation between performance metrics at the network and application levels.

Remote Instrumentation Services go far beyond offering networked access to remote instrument resources. They are establishing as a way of fully integrating instruments (including laboratory equipment, large-scale experimental facilities, and sensor networks) in a Service Oriented Architecture, where users can view and operate them in the same fashion with computing and storage resources. The deployment of test beds for a large basis of scientific instrumentation and e-Science applications is mandatory to develop new functionalities to be embedded in the existing middleware to enable such integration, to test them on the field, and to promote their usage in scientific communities. The DORII (Deployment of Remote Instrumentation Infrastructure) project is a major effort in this direction. The paper presents the performance monitoring infrastructure that has been built in DORII and the results concerning a selected application in seismic engineering.

In the past 6 years, a number of targeted initiatives, funded by the European Commission via its information society and RTD programmes and Greek infrastructure development actions, have articulated a successful regional development actions in South East Europe that can be used as a role model for other international developments. The SEEREN (South-East European Research and Education Networking initiative) project, through its two phases, established the SEE segment of the pan-European G 'EANT network and successfully connected the research and scientific communities in the region. Currently, the SEE-LIGHT project is working towards establishing a dark-fiber backbone that will interconnect most national Research and Education networks in the region. On the distributed computing and storage provisioning i.e. Grid plane, the SEE-GRID (South-East European GRID e-Infrastructure Development) project, similarly through its two phases, has established a strong human network in the area of scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure, and attracted a number of applications from different fields from countries throughout the South-East Europe. The current SEEGRID-SCI project, ending in April 2010, empowers the regional user communities from fields of meteorology, seismology and environmental protection in common use and sharing of the regional e-Infrastructure. Current technical initiatives in formulation are focusing on a set of coordinated actions in the area of HPC and application fields making use of HPC initiatives. Finally, the current SEERA-EI project brings together policy makers - programme managers from 10 countries in the region. The project aims to establish a communication platform between programme managers, pave the way towards common e-Infrastructure strategy and vision, and implement concrete actions for common funding of electronic infrastructures on the regional level. The regional vision on establishing an e-Infrastructure compatible with European developments, and empowering the scientists in the region in equal participation in the use of pan-European infrastructures, is materializing through the above initiatives. This model has a number of concrete operational and organizational guidelines which can be adapted to help e-Infrastructure developments in other world regions. In this paper we review the most important developments and contributions by the SEEGRID-SCI project.

Over the period of six years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6,600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.

A combination of networks, computational, storage infrastructure and the scientific instrumentation (equipped with sensor networks) composes a new kind of e-Infrastructure. The integration of scientific instruments into e-Infrastructure empowers possibilities in conducting experiments. The development of technologies that allow remote and shared access to laboratory instruments opens up new opportunities for researchers. This paper presents an approach to integrate the laboratory instruments with e-Infrastructure, focusing on the results of the EU FP7 DORII project.

Much interest has arisen recently on the access to and management of remote instrumentation and laboratory equipment in general. The complexity of activities related to these topics can be summarized under the name of remote instrumentation services, where the term ldquoinstrumentationrdquo includes any kind of experimental equipment, and the term ldquoservicesrdquo underlines the general framework whereby the instrumental resources should be accessed (i.e., the service oriented architecture). Building on the foundations of previous European projects, the aim of DORII (deployment of remote instrumentation infrastructure) is to build and operate a test bed addressing different areas of eScience. These include oceanographic applications, earthquake engineering, and large-scale physics experiments on synchrotron light. The paper describes the characteristics and the design of the test bed stemming from the applications' requirements, in terms of networking and middleware, and its current status of development.

This paper presents basic concepts, architectural principles and algorithms for efficient resource and security management in cluster computing environments and the Grid. The work presented in this paper is funded by BTExacT and the EPSRC project SO-GRM (GR/S21939).

THRESHOLDS TBD PAPERS Provisions and Obligations in Policy Rule Management Claudio Bettini, Sushil Jajodia, Sean Wangy, and Duminda Wijesekeray Rule-based Building-block Architectures for Policy-based Networking Yasusi Kanada and Brian J. O’Keefe Realizing network Control Policies using Distributed Action Plans Madhur Kohli and Jorge Lobo Active Robust Resource Management in Cluster Computing Using Policies Lionel Sacks, Ognjen Prnjat, Ioannis Liabotis, Temitope Olukemi, Adrian Ching, Mike Fisher, Paul McKee, Nektarios Georgalas, and Hideki Yoshii An Adaptive Policy Based Framework for Network Services Management Leonidas Lymberopoulos, Emil Lupu, and Morris Sloman REPORT TBD

This paper presents the details of the policy-based security and resource management architecture for Application Level Active Network ( alan ) servers. alan is an active network architecture which enables deployment of user-customised processes (proxylets), which enhance the existing services or introduce new services to the end-user, on the select group of servers in an ip network. The issues of security and resource management in this scenario are of crucial importance so as to efficiently facilitate and control the resource consumption of user-specified processes on the active servers, as well as to protect the server platforms from unauthorised proxylet deployment or malevolent behaviour. The architecture allowing efficient resource and security control is presented in this paper, including detailed uml diagrams capturing the management functionality, as well as a set of concrete management policies for the alan scenario. The example xml policies are also given, and the deployment of this architecture in real-life trials is described. This development forms a part of a larger management architecture for alan -enabled networks developed in the context of the ist project android (Active Network DistRibuted Open Infrastructure Development).

We present the design and implementation of the protocol for efficient resource discovery and job allocation in Application Level Active Network environments .The protocol is fully distributed and is based on the neighbour lists and small world topologies. Protocol is in XML for interoperability and extensibility; and was prototyped and first tested in the context of the ANDROID project – thus, this paper also describes the ANDROID management architecture. We present the protocol validation in the ANDROID trial, and also give detailed simulation results.

We present an implementation of a policy-based management architecture for emerging communications and computing paradigms such as Active Networks and the Grid. To manage such open, highly distributed and decentralized environments, an approach based on policy concepts is adopted, allowing support for active, dynamic adaptability in network elements, services and end-user applications, as well as achieving decentralization and distribution. We present our flexible, extensible policy and event specifications in XML, and describe our management architecture. One key feature of our approach is the distributed infrastructure: the Directory and the Management Information Distribution system. The second feature is the Resource and Security Management elements residing on the multi-node managed systems. These combine to provide a light-weight, self-organizing management architecture. As an applications example, we describe the implementation of our management system applied to the Application Level Active Networking (ALAN) environment, implemented in the European Commission Information Society Technologies (IST) project ANDROID.

Application Layer Active Networks (ALAN) allow quick and efficient deployment, on the active servers, of user-customised services (proxylets). Programmability above the transport layer makes this approach distinct form other active network initiatives. This scenario raises the issues of efficient resource management on the active server. Moreover, the deployment of user specified processes has to be highly secure so as not to harm the active server operator platform. The IST project ANDROID is using a flexible generic specification for policies, in XML, allowing a wide range of policies to be expressed and processed in a common framework. This paper presents the security and resource management architecture developed to support the application of the ANDROID policy-based principles to manage the ALAN servers. We present the architecture, as well as the sample policy sets. The prototype security and resource management implementation were demonstrated during two real-life trials and the results are presented here.

In this paper, we present the design of a self organising resource discovery protocol (SORD) for e cient resource discovery and job allocation for cluster computing/Grid scenarios. The protocol is fully distributed and is based on the peer to peer architecture and small world topologies. The evaluation of the protocol is done through simulation. The simulation scenario assumes a QoS enabled Grid infrastructure that provides Gold, Silver and Bronze class of service. We demonstrate that using SORD we can achieve e cient resource discovery minimizing the management tra c that a centralized approach would require.

Demand for diverse telecoms services is growing while currently the process of infrastructure innovation involves the lengthy task of standardisation, and large-scale deployment inevitably leads to a backlog of services. However, the time to introduce a particular service must be low, in order to meet the demand. An approach to accelerate the pace of innovation is by decoupling network services from the underlying infrastructure and allowing new services to be demand loaded into the network. One such architecture is the application level active network (ALAN), providing an environment in which developers can engineer applications through the network by utilising platforms on which 3(rd) party software (proxylets) can be dynamically loaded and run. The ALAN system consists of regular client and server applications that are located in the existing Internet. The communication is enhanced through customised services provided by user-deployed proxylets which run on the Execution Environment for Proxylets - EEP, which is essentially a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) running on an active server (the host platform). The IST project Active Network DistRibuted Open Infrastructure Development (ANDROID) is focusing on management of ALAN-enabled networks. The objective is to provide a flexible, policy-based management system that enables monitoring and control of active nodes and services. The key tasks in this context are to define a combined resource model for both processing and network resources, and to reduce management traffic and human intervention in running the network and managing the application services provided.

The emerging active network concepts, particularly those focusing on the application level, will provide the users with the flexibility of deployment of customised services on the operator's infrastructure. This will be achieved through deployment of user customised control code in virtual execution environments residing on the network nodes such as routers and servers. In order to achieve efficient network operation, the resource consumption on both element and network levels must be managed. In an active networking environment resource requirements come in three categories: bandwidth, memory and processing. Based on the active networking architecture proposed in the IST project ANDROID, we develop resource models and metrics that take into account these three resource categories. The resource models are further used to define the necessary classes of policies in order to achieve efficient resource management. Policies are expressed in XML, and an example policy is given. Finally, we present an experiment comparing the use of alternative resource allocation policies. We also briefly discuss some security issues in the application level active networks.

The advances in programmable networks enforce the importance of ensuring and maintaining the integrity and security of the network and the supporting systems. In the future programmable network scenarios, the threats to integrity and security will rapidly increase as third-party value added service providers and end-users start deploying their customised applications on the operator infrastructure. Here we discuss some typical integrity issues relevant in the programmable network scenarios. We introduce the Application Level Active Networking (ALAN) principles, and the basic management principles of ALAN-enabled networks, developed by the IST project ANDROID (Active Network Distributed Open Infrastructure Development). In this context, we discuss the candidate approach to managing the integrity issues in ALANenabled networks and reflect on some integrity-oriented techniques. Finally, we focus on security management, and briefly describe the ANDROID security architecture.

: Active services networks will give to users the flexibility to have access to custom services created by them or third party service providers. The Internet will become much more attractive but also services will turn out to be more versatile. The complexity of such a system is expected to be very high making traditional network management strategies unable to cope with the organization of the whole network. New adaptive techniques must be introduced in order to handle the rapid and many small changes in the network state. Genetic algorithms and biological inspired models seem to make the network adaptive to unpredictable changes. Some simulation results prove that those models are promising for the management of the future networks.